By Christopher A. Sawyer
The Virtual Driver

(April 23, 2013) Prodrive is developing a new approach to the design of race vehicles that, it claims, can slash the cost of developing a competitive vehicles by up to 50 percent. That has the potential to save a lot of money. The British engineering concern claims the approach focuses engineering resources for maximum return on investment, can be applied across any formula, and will “almost guarantee” a competitive vehicle.

Those are brave claims, but ones suited to an increasingly regulation-oriented worldview that seeks to equalize performance and discourage innovation.



In a nutshell, the process combines Prodrive’s motorsport engineering with value analysis expertise from the company’s road car engineering consultancy. “Automotive engineers have impressive systems to help them meet tough performance and quality targets within specific budgets,” says Prodive’s Motorsport Technical Director David Lapworth.

“Working with colleagues from our Automotive Technology division helped us understand how to translate their value analysis techniques into a rigorous process that supports design decisions, correlating engineering investment with performance value far more precisely.”

The process begins with a rigorous definition of the vehicle’s performance sensitivity to incremental changes in the characteristics of each significant component. This is done by quantifying the parameters through which system performance can be defined. Models are then developed to link changes in these parameters to the amount of change in overall vehicle performance.

As you might expect, the first step involves the creation of a generic model of an ideal vehicle for the racing formula. From this, specific targets are set for key performance factors like weight, weight distribution, center of gravity, aerodynamic forces, engine power, etc. Then the team works to analyze to what degree each component contributes to these performance factors, and rigorously defines what the improvement to the total vehicular performance will be with each change.

This gives a precise understanding of the cost involved in making the car competitive, as well as the cost of each additional increase in performance.

“At this stage, we have a very precise understanding of the cost of making the car competitive and of each additional step in performance improvement. It’s essentially a Euro per second/kilometer in the case of rallying or Euro per second/lap in racing,” says Lapworth.

“The power of the approach is that this allows us to make decisions very quickly and very accurately, ensuring that time and money are only invested where they will deliver most value. Everyone in the design team understands these parameters and therefore does not waste time over-engineering a component, seeking costly incremental improvement in component performance that contributes very little to overall vehicle performance.”

This is nothing new to Prodrive, who developed a generic rally car for new World Rally Championship regulations in 2011. Not knowing which car it would put this effort into, it spent a lot of time making sure it understood every parameter that affected vehicle performance, and created a model-based process from it.

Prodrive then entered into talks with three automakers, and decided to work with Mini. The result was the Countryman-based Mini World Rally Car that Prodive claims was delivered quickly, took very little testing, and achieved three podium finishes in its first seven outings.

Says Lapworth: “The design and development budget for that program was a fraction of the norm, indeed less than 50% of what we had previously spent on developing the Subaru Impreza WRC.” Prodrive then applied this process to the design of Aston Martin Racing’s GTE entry for Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship.

Now it is using the system to develop generic vehicles of Global RallyX and Dakar. Richard Taylor, who led the company’s multiple world championship-winning Subaru World Rally Championship team says, “We see RallyX… catching the attention of manufacturers and major global brands looking to use sport as a marketing platform,” he says.

Prodrive has started to analyze the RallyX and Dakar regulations in search of those nuances that offer competitive advantage. “Over the coming months, we are developing theoretically-optimized models for both, which will allow us to develop a competitive car very quickly,” he concludes.

The Virtual Driver